Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by @goldendaze_illustration

What does Tame Impala‘s Kevin Parker think of his older albums?

Like any good artist, Tame Impala‘s Kevin Parker is always looking to the future.

Fortunately for fans, earlier this year UPROXX managed to cajole him into looking back at his four albums discography.

Innerspeaker

“I was just f*cking screwing around on Instagram this morning,” he started off, “and I saw a comment that was like, ‘First album was great. Everything else after that was trash.’ When I read sh*t like that, it only warms my heart. I don’t know why it warms my heart. I find it kind of stimulating.”

The album referred to here, of course, is 2010’s InnerSpeaker, which he believes belongs more to his fans than him.

“I almost don’t feel like it’s me that made that,” he noted. “It feels like someone else. My scope has just widened. Back then, I was terrified of doing anything other than what I knew how to do and what I liked listening to. I guess I wasn’t as brave as I am now… InnerSpeaker was what the previous five years of my musical life had led up to.”

“I was a shy person,” he confides. “I was shy personally and musically. The fact that everyone thought it was a band is an example of how shy I was musically. I didn’t even want to tell people that I made the whole thing by myself.”

Lonerism

Despite Lonerism’s status as a critics’ favorite, Parker is critcial of his second album too.

“I just think it sounds cute,” Tame Impala‘s mastermind remarks, “because it’s like, ‘Oh my God. This kid doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ But the best kinds of music are like that, right?”

His enthusiasm then picks up.

“I had just this sudden bolt of confidence,” Kevin shares, “and ambition, and boldness. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still proud of InnerSpeaker. It’s one of my babies. But with Lonerism, for whatever reason, I guess I’d just found my calling more so than before. I had this wave of curiosity and boldness. I just felt fearless. There are more pop songs on Lonerism than the first one or anything I’d done before. Even though the sound is totally gnarled and blown out, to me it sounded like Backstreet Boys in some of it, or it sounded like Prince.”

“I feel the world’s weight. Making Lonerism was probably one of the most creatively fertile times of my life,” he notes. “Then, of course, putting it all together, and mixing it, and signing off it, was the hardest.”

Currents

Currents he likes.

“Of the three, not including The Slow Rush,” Parker enthuses, “it’s the one I can listen to the easiest.”

“I just wanted to make a high fidelity album,” he continues. “I was listening to a lot of R&B at that time, really clean, impactful sounds. So I just wanted to make a silky album. I wanted to embrace being a producer more because I started to idolize hip-hop producers and R&B producers more so than artists even sometimes.”

He still has his reservations though: “I listen to the mixing now, and I’m like, ‘Ugh! What was that guy doing?’ But that’s natural.”

The Slow Rush

At the time of the interview, it was Tame Impala’s fourth album The Slow Rush which was Parker’s favorite.

“I wanted to try and use things from totally different worlds in the way that a hip-hop producer would,” he reveals. “To be almost collage-y. Make a soundscape and build a song from there. When I first started putting “It Might Be Time” together, I was like, ‘This is going to be unlistenable.’ Because I didn’t know if it sounded like Supertramp or The Chemical Brothers or Pharrell Williams. I could hear all those kind of things. At the end, I decided it sounds somewhere in between.”